College and Firm Partner on New Technologies

SUNY Cortland is partnering with a Syracuse, N.Y., software and business solutions company to help develop new smart technologies aimed at making older manufacturing equipment more efficient.

MacKintok Inc. was recently awarded $25,000 by the CenterState Corporation for Economic Opportunity to design and build a prototype device through a partnership with SUNY Cortland’s Physics Department. The funding comes from CenterState’s “Grants for Growth” program, which assists strategic partnerships between Central New York educational institutions and businesses in the region.

“I view this collaboration as offering significant potential benefits to the department and our students,” said Brice Smith, chair of the College’s Physics Department. “I feel that together we can help contribute to the development and adoption of important, new technologies created by MacKintok that would have a positive impact on the future economic development of Central New York.”

The project will provide research opportunities for students pursuing SUNY Cortland’s professional master’s degree in sustainable energy systems.

The goal is to create a compact, energy-efficient prototype of a device that uses sensors to collect operating data from older, “legacy” machines that were built with limited capability for computer connectivity.

MacKintok, founded and operated by military veterans with service-connected disabilities, provides the manufacturing and machine tool industry with information retrieval tools that link the physical and digital worlds. The company’s systems assist in all aspects of the manufacturing process, whether it's installation, production, maintenance or troubleshooting.

The College will investigate the reliability, efficiency and limits of wireless sensors that would be used to comprehensively monitor manufacturing equipment for a variety of variables.

This resulting real-time information would be streamed to MacKintok’s cloud-based data storage system. The company’s mobile and Web-based applications would then enable clients to analyze their processes and operations 24 hours a day.

Established in 2004, MacKintok’s mission is to help engineers, skilled trades and production personnel get information quickly and accurately in order to make informed decisions and learn of potential problems as they develop. Although factories of all sizes can benefit from its technology, MacKintok’s focus is on small- and medium-sized businesses.

Its relationship with SUNY Cortland began more than a year ago, through discussions sparked by Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Start-Up New York program aimed at encouraging beneficial partnerships between new or growing businesses and SUNY’s 65 statewide campuses.